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Interviews: Ask Bre Pettis About Making Things
As co-founder and CEO of MakerBot Industries, Bre Pettis is a driving force in the Maker and 3-D printing world. He's done a number of podcasts for Make, and even worked as an assistant at Jim Henson's Creature Shop in London after college. Makerbot's design community, Thingiverse, boasts over 100,000 3D models, and inspires countless artists and designers by allowing them to share their designs. Bre has agreed to set aside some time from printing in order to type answer to your questions. Normal Slashdot interview rules apply.
Ask about making things? What can you tell me about making Slashdot Beta go away?
It seems consumer 3d printers mostly deal with plastics. Will we see other materials soon? I'm specifically interested in printing metal objects.
How much did you pay to get a Slashvertisement?
Do you think it would mop the floor with the competition simply because they'd make it so that any granny could pick it up and use it easily?
Many of the things I want to build with a 3D printer are not complicated but are outside the build envelope of the printers out there. Like my truck grill which is about 48" wide, 12" tall and 3" deep.
Why don't we have bigger print envelopes? This should just be a matter of more steps of the stepper motor.
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When will I be able to make my own space rocket from a pile of rocks to a finished product?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Stratasys acquired Makerbot a few months ago. Has things changed on the hardware or software side? What changes await for the future?
Will Makerbot release a cheaper FDM 3D printer?
Does Makerbot have any plans for an UV 3D printer, either laser-based or projector-based?
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I have heard from the BBC, forums and other internet hangouts that 3-D printers are unreliable. You can start to print something and the printer errors, or the process is somehow falters , causing you to restart all over again.
I this true, and do you expect as the tech captures more attention, so will reliability?
I note that the Replicator 2 and Replicator 2X share many components.
Will there ever be plans to release an upgrade kit for the Replicator 2 which adds a more powerful Power Supply, Heated Build Plate, and/or a second Extruder Head Assembly?
It would be nice to be able to add those options to the Rep2 in order to print ABS and other materials, or to do multi-color prints.
Follow up Question relies on the proviso that an upgrade kit is planned....
Will you shut up and take my money already?!
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
Mr. Pettis thanks for taking the time. Your 3D printers are nice.
My question:
What is needed to take consumer home-based 3D printing beyond novelty items? Specifically everyday home consumers not pure hobbyists.
Of course 3D fabricators are used for more than "novelty items" in several commercial and industrial applications, but for several reasons, not the least of which is cost of the 3D fabricator, most of what people make is just knick knacks, novelty items, and bric-a-brac.
What will we need to see technologically to take consumer home fabrication beyond things like action figures? Ex: making something like a flashlight or toothbrush
Thank you Dave Raggett
How close to mainstream will 3D printers become?
I've talked to makers who predict everyone will have a 3D printer in their home. I've heard other opinions that 3D printing will become a common hobby like building model railroads, astronomy, or programming. Yet others believe it is a fad and it will return to being a tool for professional engineers only. What do you think?
What do you say to the many articles that are along the lines of "3D printers in every home will print anything"? Today's 3D printers have nowhere near that capability. The materials available are quite restrictive and the output is relatively crude. I have read many articles making outrageous claims that home 3D printing will change the face of manufacturing very soon. When I look closely at the claims, such as printing electronics, I see they are impossible. It has gotten to the point that I don't believe anything coming out of the 3D community. They have cried wolf too many times. What do you say on that subject?
What kinds of useful objects do you envisage being printed which aren't available from a local store? I've been following 3D printing for a while and have helped build a few machines, but the only objects I've seen printed are either purely aesthetic (eg. keyrings) or could be bought from a local shop in less time than the print takes.
Many useful items that one could build require some metal bits in addition to 3D printed parts. I've recently encountered this situation when trying to make a little gizmo with motor drive. Small gears, shafts and so forth are very hard to come by. Have you considered starting an ancillary industry that provides the sorts of things that the company Small Parts used to offer, before Amazon killed them?
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
I highly doubt they'll answer this, but I'd be curious to know what kind of impact they actually felt from doing this. Did they actually see a drop in their sales? Personally they lost a potential customer in me, but I get that nerd range as a thing tends to appear more wide spread than it actually is.
Fuck turncoat Petis. I don't want to ask him a god damn thing.
Similar to the metal powder sintering question above... MIG welding is an additive process that could be used to make 3D parts, similar to the way a plasma CAM cuts out parts.... is there any hope that 3D printing will go this direction or is it too imprecise to make decent parts?
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
Nothing to do with 3D printing, but still pretty cool and possibly of interest: http://www.concretecanvas.com/
It's basically a concrete building in a box that two people can set up with water and an air compressor.
Besides patents, there's a lot of other obstacles to home laser sintering based printers.
Sourcing that metal powder, sourcing the inert gas you need to use, the cost of the laser (though some of that comes down to patents, it's still not as cheap as a "hot metal thing"), safety concerns, fumes, etc..
I think the truth is that the robotic glue gun approach is going to be the best we get for a while.
We said that about ebook readers for _years_ until they finally did become decent.
Not claiming 3D printing is anywhere near practical yet, or will be in the near future.. but comparing what you could do with a 3D printer a few years ago to now, you definitely see real progress.
We still haven't hit the limit of what we can do with robotically controlled glue guns yet. The coming wave is multi-headed printers with dissolving materials that can be used as temporary filler, allowing the printing of complex inner workings and eliminating one of the biggest problems we currently have: dealing with gravity.
Those are great advancements but what is the solution to the inability to produce a smooth surface using the glue gun approach? It is a problem with extruding out of a round nozzle that the surfaces will always have ridges. Round nozzles are needed to be able to print in any direction.
You started out as a 3 man company, but somehow you have 'lost' the other two founders. Was the size of your ego to blame for that?
And: why are your printers not allowed to print during shows and conventions? Too much chance something goes wrong with them?
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
No idea, but that doesn't exactly seem like an insurmountable problem. Rotating nozzles maybe? Or some kind of finishing process (maybe laser based?), or just variable diameter nozzles that can go down to ridiculously fine sizes.
To be honest, smooth printing has never been a huge concern to me. The material selection is the wall that we'll eventually hit. There's only so many materials that can be used in this manner, and that's the big limiting factor that I don't see this tech ever overcoming. That said, you can do a whole hell of a lot with plastic.
Uh..
Not even sure if trolling at this point. The primary tech behind those readers, "electronic paper", has been an ongoing development effort since the 70s. It went from a very primitive technology to pretty damn good, at which point it developed mass appeal and caught on.
Perhaps something's happened in the meantime, but I've seen Bre demonstrate Makerbots at a couple different conventions over the last few years -- printing away ...
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Bre:
In the larger world of 3-D printing, obviously there are manufactures who have never been particularly maker-friendly. You started off, though, with very affordable kits, and a connection to the RepRap foundation, which emphasized open source code, reproduceability, openness, etc.
(Wikipedia's a bit out of date on this front, but as of this moment, the entry there says "MakerBot Industries' products are designed to be built by anyone with basic technical skills and are described as about as complicated as assembling IKEA furniture.[8] The printers are sold as do it yourself kits, requiring only minor soldering.")
A lot of the excitement that I had when I first saw MakerBots (at Seattle's Metrix CreateSpace) derived from the fact that one of the Maker Bots they had was built with pieces printed by the other, RepRap style. It seems like a lot of the innovation in the earlier models was based on shared enthusiasm and tinkering. The company has since moved away from the open source hardware model. Do you have any regrets about this? Are there open source contributions that the company is making but that just aren't well known?
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
My argument is more along the lines of most technology started out as shit and then got better. If you think about it, it's pretty rare for a technology to develop strong interest and not improve over time. Bad ideas usually die quickly. Good ones tend to hang in there until they eventually pan out (or hit some kind of insurmountable obstacle).
More to the point, there is an obvious trend of improvement, and a visible horizon where ideas are currently "being worked on" with no reason to suspect they won't eventually happen (like the water soluble support materials thing). You can very clearly see progress from where this whole thing started, to where we are now, to where things are heading. I don't see anything indicating that's going to stop.
Ultimately though I wasn't arguing specifically that 3D printing is going to be a huge success based on the fact that ereaders were. I was arguing that it's too early to call it. Just as ereaders initially sucked then got better, so could 3D printers. Wasn't meant to be an argument that they would, just that they could.
How did the transition from being an open source darling to a danger to the whole 3d-printing community work out for you? How do you feel about kicking out your two co-founders because big money demanded it?
Dear Mr. Pettis, Why did you join the dark side of the force ?